Enmeshed Realities

Rather than asking whether digital technologies are simply good or bad for youth, Enmeshed Realities examines how young people actively inhabit, traverse, and negotiate digital ecologies: the interconnected, enmeshed online and offline worlds that shape everyday life. Responding to dominant moral panics and risk-focused narratives that frame youth as vulnerable or “up to no good” online, the book shifts attention away from fear-based discourses towards young people’s own perspectives and experiences. The book adopts a youth-centered, mixed-methods approach, grounded in surveys, focus groups, and interviews with fifteen-to-seventeen-year-old young people living in and around Ottawa, Canada. Exploring four key thematic areas, it specifically examines how digital ecologies shape young people’s experiences of identity and belonging, loneliness and the fear of missing out, relationships and dating, and family life. Across these domains, young people describe digital ecologies as spaces of both pleasure and difficulty, as well as connection and tension. Child and youth studies researchers Daniella Bendo and Dale Spencer conclude that understanding young people’s digital lives requires moving beyond simplistic narratives of harm towards nuanced, good-faith engagement with their lived realities.